FOREST SERVICE Migrant firefighters present safety risks

Contractors with better safety records are becoming frustrated.
SACRAMENTO BEE
As bright orange embers lofted through the forest, exploding into columns of smoke and flame, Mike Sulffridge and his crew of firefighters began to scramble. Their lives were in danger.
But the reaction of six Latino firefighters working near them could not have been more different. Despite the advancing flames, despite a volley of warning shouts, they did nothing.
"They did not understand English," said Sulffridge, who was hired to battle the wildfire in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah in 2000. "They did not understand what the fire was doing."
Ultimately, the men were rescued. But the fire took a toll. One man was burned badly across his face. "In another few seconds, those guys would have been burned up," Sulffridge said. "They would have died."
Firefighting has always been dangerous. But today, with the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies hiring more private contractors to do the work, a different kind of firefighter is in harm's way: migrant workers who have minimal experience and training, speak little or no English and often are in the country illegally.
Keeping track
Public records offer a glimpse of what crew inspectors have documented: underage workers, counterfeit IDs, falsified training records, a van roll-over, broken and dangerous tools, even a firefighter with only one lung who "went into convulsions ... and was having difficulty breathing," as one federal inspector in Washington put it.
"There's got to be more checks, more accountability and more consequences," said Joe Ferguson, a former Forest Service incident commander who was shocked by problems he encountered involving Latino firefighting crews in 2002.
"The work force in the country is changing, and we have to change with it," Ferguson said. "But that doesn't mean we have to compromise safety in the process."
Fewer than a dozen contractors are responsible for most of the problems. Despite that, they are rehired year after year by the government, frustrating contractors with better safety records.
"There should have been a three strikes and you're out rule adopted 10 years ago," said Nelda Herman, president of GH Ranch L.L.C., an Oregon fire contractor. "We'd be better off today."
In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General sharply criticized the Forest Service for chronic mismanagement of Latino contract crews.
The audit said the Forest Service had failed to ensure that Latino firefighters are properly qualified and trained, or even that they are legal.
"Undocumented workers are a problem on contract firefighting crews," it said.
Solving problems
Forest Service officials say they are committed to solving the problems. But they acknowledge being caught off guard by the rapid growth of the private firefighting sector.
"This is an industry that has blossomed so significantly it was difficult for us to keep pace," said Neal Hitchcock, deputy director of operations for the Forest Service at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. "We recognize there is a lot of work to do, and we're getting organized to do it."
Nationwide, there are about 5,000 contract firefighters on call during fire season. Most are based in Oregon and roughly 80 percent are Latino. Four thousand or so are overseen by the Oregon Department of Forestry but are often deployed to federal wildfires out of state. The rest are managed directly by the Forest Service.
Much of the industry's growth has been driven by the Forest Service itself, fueled by its reliance on the private sector to do jobs once performed by government and a need to replace agency employees lost to budget cuts and retirement.
"The Forest Service has shrunk so small we just don't have the resources," said Robert Gavenas, a fire crew inspector for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington.
About 90 companies compete fiercely for the work. Many have drifted into firefighting from reforestation, an industry that has prospered by tapping large pools of migrant workers, some legal but many not -- whenever and wherever the sporadic work arises.
Money issue
What's drawing contractors to firefighting is the chance to earn big money. A 20-man crew of firefighters can bring a contractor $7,000 a day, including overtime. Crew wages make up about $4,800 of that, an average of $15 an hour for a 16-hour day.
"This is a big-money item," said Gavenas. "There is an incentive to get your crews on the fire line."
Problems also occur on controlled burns, set intentionally to thin forest vegetation. Emilio Morales Donis, a native of Guatemala, said he was injured in such a burn in the Rockies in 2002.
"I was working on a fire line. A log I was lifting slipped. It landed on my wrist, pinning it to the ground," he said. Wrenching his hand free, Morales said he approached his foreman. His wrist was throbbing.
"He told me, 'Hurry up. We have to finish this area,'" Morales recounted. Despite the pain, Morales complied, working one-handed. There was no aspirin, not even a Band-Aid. "In the mountains we didn't even carry a first-aid kit," he said.
Asked last week if he had any training, Morales said no. "We learned on our own," he said. "You figure out how to do the job as time goes by."